


Say Your Right Words

by Crunchysunrises



Category: Hulk (2003), Labyrinth (1986), Labyrinth/Hulk, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Incredible Hulk - All Media Types
Genre: Community: fic_promptly, Community: hc_bingo, Community: kink_bingo, Community: trope_bingo, Crossover, Crossover Pairings, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, F/M, Fae & Fairies, Romance, Wishes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-27
Updated: 2013-12-27
Packaged: 2018-01-06 08:49:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1104846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Crunchysunrises/pseuds/Crunchysunrises
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the Labyrinth (and there is only ever one), Sarah tries on names like she tries on wardrobes. There is Annie, Ravena, and eventually Betty. Bruce Banner is oblivious to the very real danger that he is in.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Say Your Right Words

**Author's Note:**

> **Title:** Say Your Right Words  
>  **Fandom:** Labyrinth/the Hulk  
>  **Rating:** PG  
>  **Content Notes:** None  
>  **Disclaimer:** I have no rights to or within the Labyrinth or Marvel franchises, copyrights, characters or trademarks. This is for fun, not profit.  
>  **Summary:** After the Labyrinth (and there is only ever one), Sarah tries on names like she tries on wardrobes. There is Annie, Ravena, and eventually Betty. Bruce Banner is oblivious to the very real danger that he is in.  
>  **Additional Notes:** Fulfills the “power exchange” square of my Kink Bingo card, the "poltergeist" square of my Hurt/Comfort Bingo card, the "au: fairytale/myth" square of my Trope Bingo card, and the "manipulation" square on my Dark Fantasy Bingo. Also fulfills the "Author's choice, author's choice, the danger of saying a wish out loud" from fic_promptly.

After the Labyrinth (and there is only ever one), Sarah tries on names like she tries on wardrobes. She is Annie one week and June the next. She is Peggy Sue and Ravena and Maude.

Annie wears full, ankle-length skirts, diaphanous scarves, and pale blue nail polish. She is theatrical, loves Shakespeare, and listens to Les Miserable in the car. Annie feels too small for Sarah’s self, like she is trying to crawl back into a skin that she has already sloughed.

June is an academic who studies with single-minded intensity. She makes excellent grades, wears baggy clothes, and is too busy to worry about the blue nail polish that is slowly but surely being chipped away. She has nothing to say to Sarah’s preexisting friends nor does she make new friends. June’s intellect and determination appeal to Sarah but she is ill-fitting, chafing where she should give and loose where she should fit snugly against Sarah’s self.

Peggy Sue is wild and dangerous and fun. She wears screaming red nail polish, teases boys, and is utterly fearless. Peggy Sue’s laughter is a too wild, too loud, and too long. Her best magic tricks involve making things disappear, like her dates’ money, her mother’s clothes, and that pair of designer jeans at the mall. Peggy Sue, who fits Sarah no better than Annie and June did, would have known what to do at Jared’s faery ball.

Ravena is filled with overwrought Gothic poetry and the existential angst of the truly comfortable. She wears black clothes, black nail polish, and heavy silver jewelry made from stainless steel chains and rust. Her earrings, which are beaten and twisted iron she bought at a craft fair, burn with cold. She does poorly concealed magic and claims it to be mere trickery and deception because in fairytales things are rarely as they seem. Running the Labyrinth changes everyone in one way or another, Sarah included.

Maude is the closest to right but still ultimately wrong. She has short hair that she keeps in a boxy buzz cut and pink nail polish and sensible shoes. Maude worries about social issues, joins school clubs, and natters about organic and free-range foods so much that even she begins to tune herself out. She has a hemp necklace with a small, curling seashell on it and wears boys’ board shorts, and kisses a girl once (but doesn’t like it.)

There are others, of course. Other names and faces and identities that Sarah tries on, ignoring the laughter of her peers and the open exasperation of her parents, both biological and step. True names have power and Sarah intends to keep hers well hidden.

In the end, Sarah chooses to be called Betty, takes her stepfather’s surname of Ross, and settles on studying human magic, namely science. She keeps all of what makes her Sarah Williams and adds to it Annie’s fun nail polish and diaphanous scarves, June’s studiousness, Peggy Sue’s fearless adventurousness, and Ravena’s coldly burning earrings. As Betty, she keeps her old friends and makes a few new ones.

Given her childhood preoccupation with the theater and protesting her various stepparents and half-siblings, Sarah’s choices cause a minor kerfuffle in her family. The part of her that is still very much like Jared revels in the confusion.

It only takes six months to get all of her friends to use her new name and a year to persuade her four parents to accept it. Inside of two years Sarah knows that even they have forgotten that she was ever called anything else. Soon the paperwork regarding her change of name will be lost and, as far as this world will know, she will have always been Betty Ross. There will remain in existence only six beings who will remember that she was once Sarah Williams and they all love her too much in their own ways to ever use that knowledge against her.

Magic, true magic, is such a terribly useful skill to have.

Sarah, now Betty to all the world, gets through her undergraduate degrees with high marks, higher honors, and many friends and in graduate school meets a doctoral student named Bruce Banner. She has always had a thing for intelligent men who are more than they seem and sweet, gentle, oblivious Bruce makes her skin tingle with the possibilities.

Betty falls wildly in love with him. And, because she loves him, she tells him stories about a girl who wished her little brother away to the goblins and then ran the Labyrinth to get him back.

“I can’t believe that you tell me the same bedtime stories as you tell your little brother,” Bruce grumbles their second Christmas together, when Betty has brought him home to the Williams house for the holidays.

“They’re my favorite,” Betty says simply.

“Well, Toby’s obviously the baby,” Bruce replies. He props his head on his fist and, looking down at her in their shared bed, asks, “Who am I? The Goblin King?”

“Absolutely not!” Betty says crisply. “You’re a different story entirely.”

“A happy one?” he asks wistfully. There has already been a surfeit of sorrow in Bruce’s life.

“I don’t know,” Betty replies, gently touching his hair. “It hasn’t ended yet. And we’re just getting to the good parts.”

Grinning, Bruce leans down to kiss her mouth and all talk of stories, old and new, is dropped in favor of quiet mischief made together.

They will spend New Year’s with the Rosses and fly out to visit his (adoptive) parents’ graves before the school year starts up again.

When Bruce graduates, Betty sits in the front row and cheers him on. Afterwards, Betty gives him peaches and a fountain pen and loves him so much that it hurts. Bruce, who is never overly demonstrative, is as close as he might ever get to incandescent with joy.

Bruce earns a fellowship and a non-tenured position on the university’s staff and stays on, where Betty can touch him, tease him, and go home with him at the end of every day. If ( _when_ ) he asks to marry her, Betty fully intends to say yes and enjoy him for as long as she may keep him.

Three months after earning his doctorate, one of Bruce’s experiments goes terribly, terribly wrong. His lab at the university is wrecked, his assistants end up in traction, and Bruce is taken into government custody. No one, not even Betty’s stepfather will tell her what is happening or why.

(Bruce would but Bruce is as confused and befuddled as Betty herself is.)

Betty does not know how wrong things have gone for her Bruce until he shows up on her doorstep three days later: enormous, green, and very, very angry. It is the only time that Betty has ever seen him emotionally naked, open, and raw.

She likes it.

Betty Ross, who was once a girl named Sarah Williams, has fought goblins, bested a faery prince, and grown up in Ludo’s long (and very wide) shadow. She is not afraid of Bruce’s rage.

“Oh, Bruce,” she sighs as he carefully picks her up, one large hand cupped carefully around her waist.

He growls at her, apparently disagreeing with his appellation, and then pets her hair with his other hand, showing her an endearing amount of careful roughness.

For a moment, Betty wonders if Bruce has accepted a potion or a bauble from a (handsome and) malevolent stranger but casts that thought aside as ridiculous. Bruce is always so careful and controlled. He would never accept the unknown into his system. And there is nothing of the older magics in his transformation. It is pure science.

 _He_ is pure science in a way that Betty, despite all of her learning, will never be. _Can_ never be, truth be told, not after the Labyrinth.

When he starts to carry her off, Betty has the presence of mind to lean down and grab her purse from the side table on the way out the door.

“Hulk?” Betty tries, remembering Bruce’s description of his vivid dreams in which he is reborn as an enormous, hulking creature. There had been more truth in those dreams than Bruce had realized. There was usually more truth in dreams than most people realized.

In the present, Hulk grunts, pats her on the head again, and carries her out to her car. It is third-hand with chipped paint, peeling bumper stickers, and a window that sticks.

“Hulk,” he grunts as he carefully stows her within the automobile’s confines just before the pack of mutant dogs attacks. Betty watches him fight for her life and thinks, _Sir Didymus would certainly approve of him._

There is no longer any room in the human world for someone like Bruce Banner. The mad scientists, military men, and fear of that world will grind him down into first despair and then nothingness. But Sarah knows other, more wide open places where a doctor and a Hulk would be accepted, even welcomed.

He just needs to say his right words.

One way or another, she will _make_ him say his right words.

 

 

It is surprisingly easy to trick Bruce into wishing himself into her power, probably because he has never truly believed in magic or fairytales or wishes. But he believes in Betty and that is more than enough.

So, after he is his proper size and shape, relaxed, and tucked up in her bed, Betty curls up beside Bruce and tells him a story about a strange, sad man who has had a surfeit of sorrow and the Goblin Queen who had fallen in love with him.

“I know this story,” Bruce says sleepily. “But I’m not Toby.”

“Of course not,” Betty says scornfully. “The Goblin Queen doesn’t want or need another goblin. And she certainly doesn’t feel any sort of sisterly affection toward her mortal.”

“Then what does she feel?” Bruce asks with poorly disguised need.

“Friendship and attraction, at first,” Betty says, casting her mind back to those early days between them. “Affection, lust, and certainly love; an abundance of love, enough to open worlds, cheat fate, and reorder time for him.”

Bruce smiles up at her and, touching a long lock of her dark hair, says, “That might be closer to obsession than love, Betty.”

It is a painful echo of something that she herself had once told Jareth. The fae love well but never wisely and Betty is no exception. But what she wishes for Bruce is not the same as what Jared had once wished for her. Sarah already has an equal and a king in Jareth and no interest in being feared or served. She simply wants Bruce and, more importantly, she wants Bruce to be safe and happy and well, even if that means losing his love.

Bruce will be none of those things – safe, happy, well, or even hers – if he stays in this world much longer. Already, she can feel time and fate tightening their nets around him. Soon, they will neither of them have any choices left to make.

Carelessly, his short eyelashes fluttering shut, Bruce mumbles, “but I appreciate the sentiment.”

“Do you think you’d want to stay with her?” Sarah asks. “Even if her love isn’t human in its scope?”

“You’re human, Betty,” Bruce says. Forcing his eyes open so that he can look up at her, he bitterly adds, _“He’s_ not and he never was. Everything about him was a lie.”

“Not everything,” Betty replies. Around her, the air begins to tingle with the beginnings of her spell. “His love wasn’t a lie. And neither was hers. I think that they could still be happy together if he says his right words.”

“I love you?” Bruce offers, oblivious to the very real danger that he is in.

“Bruuuce,” Betty cheerfully complains. “That’s very sweet but you know that’s not what I meant! Say your right words!”

Looking her in the eyes, Bruce smiles sweetly and says, “I wish the Goblin Queen would come and take me away right now.”

He is teasing, the delivery is lackluster, and he does not believe in magic but his belief in her more than makes up for his shortcomings.

“Yes,” Betty breathes, accepting his unwitting offer. “Yes, of course I will, Bruce.”

Her power washes away the world around them, replacing the cozy cabin with a drafty castle. Underneath them, their queen size bed is replaced with a decadent four poster king size bed, complete with canopy, curtains, and thick, downy duvets. A fire roars in the fireplace and the window changes sizes and shapes while beyond it, the stars rearrange themselves into the Underground’s constellations.

Bruce, perhaps beginning to realize his mistake far too late, looks around them with confusion and then the outermost edge of alarm but it is far, far too late for that.

“Welcome to the Underground, my Bruce.”

 


End file.
